Digital Technology and Internet

Following quite a while of unbridled excitement—verging on fixation – about everything advanced, people in general might lose confide in innovation. Online data isn’t solid, regardless of whether it shows up as news, indexed lists or client surveys. Online networking, specifically, is defenseless against control by programmers or outside forces. Individual information isn’t really private. What’s more, individuals are progressively stressed over robotization and counterfeit consciousness taking people’s employments.

However, around the globe, individuals are both progressively subject to, and incredulous of, computerized innovation. They don’t carry on as though they question innovation. Rather, individuals are utilizing innovative devices all the more seriously in all parts of day by day life. In late research on advanced trust in 42 nations (a cooperation between Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where I work, and Mastercard), my partners and I found that this conundrum is a worldwide wonder.

Some of the concerns have to do with how big a role the technology companies and their products play in people’s lives. U.S. residents already spend 10 hours a day in front of a screen of some kind. One in 5 Americans say they are online “almost constantly.” The tech companies have enormous reach and power. More than 2 billion people use Facebook every month.

Ninety percent of search queries worldwide go through Google. Chinese e-retailer, Alibaba, organizes the biggest shopping event worldwide every year on Nov. 11, which this year brought in US$25.3 billion in revenue, more than twice what U.S. retailers sold between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday last year.

This results in enormous wealth. All six companies in the world worth more than $500 billion are tech firms. The top six most sought-after companies to work for are also in tech. Tech stocks are booming, in ways reminiscent of the giddy days of the dot-com bubble of 1997 to 2001. With emerging technologies, including the “internet of things,” self-driving cars, blockchain systems and artificial intelligence, tempting investors and entrepreneurs, the reach and power of the industry is only likely to grow.

This is particularly true because half the world’s population is still not online. But networking giant Cisco projects that 58 percent of the world will be online by 2021, and the volume of internet traffic per month per user will grow 150 percent from 2016 to 2021.